LANDLESS PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT

PRESS STATEMENT AND INVITATION

“LPM LAUNCHES NATIONAL ROLLING MASS ACTION”
“MILLIONS OF POOR AND LANDLESS PEOPLE IN SA SAY ‘NO LAND! NO VOTE!’”

The Landless People’s Movement (LPM) – a national movement of poor and landless people struggling for land reform – will launch a national rolling mass action strategy this week as part of it’s “No Land! No Vote!” campaign in response to the 14 April election.

The campaign, which aims to raise the voice of millions of poor and landless people who say that “10 years of failed land reform is enough” through an organized boycott of “ballot-box democracy” in a context of broken promises, will include local, provincial and national actions culminating in a national march on election day. These actions will include a series of marches, demonstrations, assemblies, pickets, land occupations and occupations of government buildings.

The rolling mass action strategy was developed and adopted by an LPM National Strategy Meeting held in Rustenburg from 5-7 March. The meeting brought together the LPM National Council and representatives from all nine provinces who unanimously endorsed the LPM’s “No Land! No Vote!” campaign as the most appropriate response of poor and landless people to the 2004 elections.

The LPM Rustenburg meeting was clear in its belief that poor and landless people cannot join in “celebrating” ten years of democracy by voting when our voices have not been heard during those 10 years, when less that 3% of land has been redistributed from 60 000 white farmers to more than 26-million poor and landless people, and when we continue to face evictions from farms and forced removals from informal settlements 10 years after the end of apartheid.

LPM members and supporters come from many different political parties and we have voted in each of the past four elections at national and local levels, since 1994. In our communities, our regional and provincial committees, and since the LPM’s birth in July 2001, at national level, we have pleaded with the government and with other political parties, to take seriously our demand for land reform as a fundamental requirement of post-apartheid transformation. We have written letters, attended meetings, marched and delivered memoranda, we have pleaded and begged and offered solutions. We have met several times with the D-G of Land Affairs and the Minister of Land Affairs and Agriculture to explain our very reasonable demand for a national Land Summit to look at the underlying problems causing land reform to fail. Yet our cries have not been heard and our solutions have been ignored. Not a single political party has effectively supported our demands.

We are sick and tired of being used as pawns by political elites who only “care” about us at election time, then expect us to suffer our poverty and dispossession in silence for the next five years. We do not believe that going to the polls will do anything to change our lives. Only direct, organized action by the united masses of poor and landless people across South Africa can solve the land crisis that has made us slaves in the country of our birth.

That’s why the LPM is calling on all of South Africa’s 19-million poor and landless rural people and 7-million poor and landless urban people to participate in this election by boycotting the polls, and by making Xs in the streets instead. The LPM calls on all poor and landless people to support the “No Land! No Vote!” campaign by joining our national rolling mass action campaign events across the country, as follows:

Eastern Cape: March to DLA office, Umtata on 11th March

Free State: Provincial march in Bloemfontein on the 1st April

Gauteng: Assembly of landless people on the 25th March

KwaZulu-Natal: March to Department of Safety and Security, Pmb on 21st March, or march to provincial DLA on 23rd March

Mpumalanga: March to DLA office, Ermelo on 12th March

North-West: Rustenburg march in the course of the coming month

Western Cape: Mass action/gathering on 22nd March

ISSUED BY: THE LANDLESS PEOPLE’S MOVEMENT ON 11 MARCH, 2004

FOR MORE INFORMATION: CONTACT THE LPM NATIONAL ORGANISER MANGALISO KUBHEKA ON 072-127-4055